It’s been unusually long since my last posting, with the main reasons being that
Garrett Lisi has a new paper on the arXiv, with the rather over-the-top title of An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything. Sabine Hossenfelder has a typically excellent posting about the paper, and Garrett has been discussing his work with people in the comment section there. Lubos Motl, has a typically, how shall I say, Lubosian posting on the topic.
I’m the first person thanked in the acknowledgment section of the paper, but at Sabine’s blog Garrett explains that this is just because he is using reverse alphabetical order. I’ve corresponded with him in the past about his research in this area, without being able to provide any real help other than a certain amount of encouragement. Two of the ideas he is pursuing are general ones I’m also very fond of. One is well-known, and many people have also tried this, it’s the idea of bringing together the internal gauge symmetry and the symmetry of local frame rotations. The problems with this are also well-known, and some have been brought up by the commenters at Sabine’s blog. I don’t think Garrett has found the answer to this, or that he claims to. I’m still hopeful that this line of thinking will lead somewhere, but think some dramatically different new idea about this is still needed. The other idea he likes is that of trying to interpret the fermionic degrees of freedom of the BRST method for handling gauge invariance as providing the fermions of the Standard Model. I suspect there is something to this, but to get anywhere with it, a much deeper understanding of BRST will be required. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to understand some of the mathematics related to BRST in recent years, and am in the middle of writing some of this up. It seems to me that there is a lot that is not understood yet about this topic even in much simpler lower-dimensional contexts, so we’re a long way from being able to really see whether something can be done with this idea in a realistic four-dimensional setting.
One idea Garrett is fond of that has generally left me cold is the idea of unification via a large simple Lie algebra like E8. While there may be some sort of ultimate truth to this, the problem is that, just as for GUTs and for superstring models, all you’re doing when you do this is changing the unification problem into the problem of what breaks the large symmetry. This change in the problem adds some new structure to it, but just doesn’t seem to help very much, with the bottom line being that you get few if any testable predictions out of it (one exception is with the simplest GUTs, where you do get a prediction, proton decay, which turns out to be wrong, falsifying the models).
Anyway, I’m glad to see someone pursuing these ideas, even if they haven’t come up with solutions to the underlying problems. Garrett is a serious and competent researcher who has pursued a non-traditional career path, and was recently awarded a grant to by the FQXI organization. You can read more about him in an article on their web-site.
Unfortunately, some of the reaction to Garrett’s article has been depressing. A commenter who sounds well-informed but hides behind anonymity goes on about “this nonsense” (although Garrett’s polite reaction to him/her did lead to a more sensible discussion). Early on in my experience with blogs I believed that no serious professional in particle physics would attack someone and try and carry on a scientific argument anonymously, so any such comments had to be coming from misguided students, or someone not in the profession. Unfortunately I’ve all too often seen evidence that I was wrong about this. Lubos Motl on his blog denounced the fact that Garrett’s paper appeared in the hep-th section of the arXiv, then later wrote in to Sabine’s blog to crow that it had been removed from hep-th. As always with the arXiv, how moderation occurs there is non-transparent, so I don’t know how or why this happened. My own experience with the arXiv over trackbacks to hep-th has been a highly disturbing one. The current hep-th policy seems to be to allow any sort of nonsense to be posted there if it fits into the current string-theory-based ideology (see for example here), while suppressing any criticism of this. A paranoid person might be tempted to wonder whether hep-th is being moderated by someone so ideological and petty that criticism of string theory or including string theory critics in an acknowledgment section would be cause for having ones article removed from hep-th…
Update: I hear from Garrett that the story of this paper at the arXiv is that it was submitted to gr-qc, not hep-th. Before it was posted, it was re-classified as hep-th, and appeared there. Later on (after the appearance of Lubos’s blog entry denouncing the arXiv for allowing the paper on hep-th I believe), it was re-classified again, this time as general physics (with cross-listing to hep-th).
Update: Latest news about this is that the paper has now been reclassified again, to the perfectly appropriate hep-th, cross-listed as gr-qc, although no one seems to know why this happened. Another continuing mystery is the trackback situation: there are four trackbacks to the paper, to postings by Lubos, Bee, and to Physics Forums, as well as to an old TWF from John Baez that doesn’t even link to the paper. My postings still seem to be non-trackback worthy on hep-th, not that I can argue with this particular case, since the discussion elsewhere has been more substantive (except for Lubos’s, which is valuable for the way it accurately represents the hysterical reaction to speculation that is not string theory speculation all too common in certain quarters).
Update: Garrett is making the news here. Whether this is a good thing is yet another question for debate on the next thread, I guess. A lot of the attraction for the media seems to be his personal story. Maybe it’s a good thing for physics for people to see that one can be a theoretical physicist while surfing in Hawaii…
Update: Lisi-mania spreads. See stories in New Scientist, the Ottawa Citizen, Slashdot, and probably lots of other places I haven’t noticed.
Update: Steinn Sigurdsson has an excellent posting summarizing the situation. As usual, blogs are the place to get the highest quality information about scientific issues…
Update: I’ve given up on keeping track of the media stories on this. For some discussion of the representation theory involved, see this posting by Jacques Distler, and comments from Garrett.
Update: The Angry Physicist examines the Distler critique in some detail.